Thermal cameras are widely used for many different applications. For instance, thermal cameras can be used for automatic detection and recognition in video monitoring, where video monitoring of traffic is becoming an increasingly important application. Such systems monitoring traffic are typically capable of automatic alert triggering when detecting certain events, such as accidents, fires, vehicles, humans, or dropped cargo to name a few. These alert triggers are typically implemented in several ways, and it is of interest to reduce the number of false alerts.
A difficult false alert to handle is snow falling from vehicles inside a traffic tunnel. Such event is typically identified wrongly as, for example, dropped cargo or a stopped vehicle. An operator must then inspect these false alerts, and in case there is a large number of false alerts, actual alerts become less noticeable to the operator. Therefore, false alerts are a source of increased costs, as well as a safety risk.
Thus, there is a need to reduce the number of false alerts related to snow falling from vehicles.